Right goal, wrong tool. That’s what I thought when I read the recent news coverage of the announcement about a new state universal prekindergarten program.

Minnesota’s bipartisan state leaders deserve a lot of credit for recently investing in early education to narrow Minnesota’s worst-in-the-nation achievement gaps. That’s the right goal. But this year, we got sidetracked funding a universal pre-K tool that is a poor choice for achieving that goal.

Gov. Mark Dayton and legislators from both parties moved early education in Minnesota forward in recent years. They worked together to implement what is being called around the nation “the Minnesota Model” of early learning — Early Learning Scholarships and the Parent Aware quality rating and improvement system. Now, our bipartisan leaders should focus on bringing that Minnesota Model to the thousands of children under age 5 who currently are unable to access high-quality early education programs. Our leaders should not divert a staggering $300 million per year for a well-intentioned, part-day approach that offers early education help that is too little, too late and too untargeted.

TOO LITTLE

The Minnesota Department of Education’s new universal pre-K (UPK) program provides too little early education instruction for the most at-risk children. It typically offers programming two to three hours per day for nine months only (usually not during the summer). That kind of brief program doesn’t work well for the most at-risk children who are furthest behind, and it doesn’t work well for low-income parents who work more than three-hour shifts.

Scholarships, on the other hand, offer the option of full-day, full-year, high-quality Parent Aware programs. That leads to less expense and hassle for parents, and better outcomes for the most vulnerable children. Scholarships could be used at even more full-day, full-year programs if MDE would lift the cap provision it imposed on a more flexible pilot version of scholarships.

TOO LATE

Universal pre-K at age 4 also begins too late for the most vulnerable children. With research showing that achievement gaps start as early as age 1, waiting until age 4, as with UPK, is a tragic mistake. The low-income children who are most at-risk of falling into achievement gaps need multiple years in a high-quality early learning program to catch up and be prepared for kindergarten.

There’s a better way. Scholarships start a full year earlier than UPK. They could and should be made available to even younger children, along with in-home parent mentoring support.

TOO UNTARGETED

Finally, the UPK approach is too untargeted. While the first stage of program implementation is partially targeted to low-income children, UPK backers from the governor on down have made no secret that they want the program to become “universal” as soon as possible, which state law now authorizes. In other words, they want to use limited state dollars to subsidize all families, including the wealthiest Minnesota families who can already afford high-quality early education programs.

A BETTER TOOL

Again, there’s a much better and more cost-effective tool to narrow achievement gaps. Early Learning Scholarships are targeted to the low-income children who are unable to access high-quality programs. Currently, thousands of low-income children who need scholarships are not able to access them, because of insufficient funding. Those low-income children must be our top priority before we start using limited state funds subsidizing wealthier families who can already afford quality programs.

Early Learning Scholarships have been vigorously evaluated, and we know they work. We know that they are an efficient way to quickly help children who urgently need help. With scholarships, we don’t have to wait to build new programs from scratch, as with UPK. We simply tap into the high-quality Parent Aware programs that already exist in schools, centers, religious organizations, homes and nonprofits.

Best of all, research released earlier this year tells us that low-income children who are using scholarships to access these kinds of high-quality programs are making significant gains in kindergarten readiness measures. Those measures include vocabulary, executive function, social competence and early math skills.

Again, Minnesota is focused on the right goal, but we’re funding the wrong tool. We need to follow the lead of the governor and bipartisan legislators to continue investing in early education, but we need to invest in proven early education tools that deliver the right amount of help, for the right length of time, to the right children, the children who are most at-risk.

That’s how Minnesota can use early education to finally narrow our disturbing and persistent achievement gaps.

Art Rolnick, former director of research at the Federal Reserve Bank of Minneapolis, is a senior fellow at the Humphrey School of Public Affairs at the University of Minnesota.

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A) Free daycare
B) More gov’t employees to laundry money to a certain political party
C) ????
D) Profits!

daleman

The correct tool is Parenting……Ok never mind!

Rob Bauman

I am pretty sure they would like your children as soon as they are born, as we parents are just too stupid to raise our own children. We were graduating more folks 30 years ago with less class time and still found time for band, phy ed…. They call it parenting, don’t have children if you don’t want to do the work associated.

WeekendThinker

So many of these “parents” don’t have to do the work. They get paid just to create one baby after another, then it’s up to someone else to raise them and teach them. Actually being a parent is too much to ask from the baby mommies and baby daddies that are getting every thing for free.

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